2026 CBC Massey Lectures

Housing has become a crisis of humanity—one created by design and decades in the making.

Who counts and who doesn’t in the world of housing and real estate? The decisive answer by financial and political elites is that people are math equations and homes are instruments of profit. It is an answer that betrays the essential truth that housing is fundamental to existence.

Across six continents, Leilani Farha enters the homes oof people deemed disposable—families who’ve been evicted, those living in neighbourhoods remade for the rich, people criminalized for having nowhere to live. Through these intimate encounters and her own reckoning from the centre of global housing debates, Farha reveals the ideology at work: the same logic that justifies dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of their lands and resources now prices out young people, displaces tenants, destroys communities, and disappears homeless people.

Writing with fierce clarity, Farha connects these stories with her own reflections on power, complicity, and the limits of reform to spark our fight to get back home and build a new ideology—one rooted in laws, humanity, and imagination, where home is the foundation of justice.